“If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did,” National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted dryly.
During the congressional hearing, the NIH deputy director was cornered into admitting if the US taxpayers financed the research in Wuhan, China, that killed millions of people across the globe.
Representative Debbie Lesko of Arizona asked Dr. Tabak during a congressional hearing, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”
Tabak replied, “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” attempting to obfuscate a simple, and easy-to-grasp term.
The response came after more than four years of denial from Dr. Tabak and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci of their involvement with such a controversial practice where viruses are manipulated to make them more infectious.
The NIH officer argued, “This is research, the generic term [gain-of-function], is research that goes on in many, many labs around the country. It is not regulated. And the reason it’s not regulated is it poses no threat or harm to anybody.”
Dr. Bryce Nickels, co-founder of the Biosafety Now! a nongovernment organization advocating for stricter biosafety policies to prevent another pandemic, hit Dr. Tabak and said, “Tabak was engaging in the usual obfuscation and semantic manipulation that is so frustrating and pointless.”
He lamented that the NIH avoids accountability for being involved in risky research that can produce pathogens for another pandemic.
“Instead of addressing this directly, Tabak launched into a useless response about how ‘gain-of-function’ encompasses many types of experiments,” he furthered.
The US Department of Health and Human Services banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology from applying for and receiving federal grants for the next ten years.
EcoHealth Alliance, who boasted that their mission was to prevent pandemics, was also denied funding by the HHS for the next three years.
Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, denied that their organization did a gain-of-function research. He said, “[his organization] never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition.”
But this statement contradicted his private correspondence, specifically a 2016 email where he acknowledged the end of the gain-of-function research implemented by the Obama administration.
The NIH, in an October 2021 letter to Congress, admitted that the NIH funded a “limited experiment” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He refused to describe it as gain-of-function but admitted that EcoHealth “failed to report” that the bat coronaviruses modified with SARS and MERS viruses were 10,000 times more infectious, thus violating its grant terms.
To avoid accountability, the NIH also scrubbed its website with the definition of gain-of-function research the day the organization sent its letter to Congress.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: The Raging Patriot
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://theragingpatriot.org and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.